This is the 8th annual symposium organized by ASX. This event aims to educate the public on some of the projects in space exploration, and encourage students and the public to get informed and involved in the exciting discoveries of the space industry. In the past, the symposium has featured famous astronauts, numerous top researchers, and leaders in the space industry. Previously, this annual event had attracted more than 1000 audience members.

We are honored to be featuring:

Dr. Alexei Vladimir Filippenko is one of the world’s most highly cited astronomers. His primary areas of research are exploding stars (supernovas), active galaxies, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the universe; he has also spearheaded efforts to develop robotic telescopes, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), which conducts the most successful nearby Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS).

He received his B.A. in Physics from UC Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech, subsequently becoming a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. Dr. Filippenko’s research accomplishments, documented in over 640 published papers, have been recognized by several major awards. He was a member of both teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, which was voted the top “Science Breakthrough of 1998” by the editors of Science magazine; the teams received the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their discovery. He has won the top teaching awards at UC Berkeley and has been voted the “Best Professor” on campus seven times. In 2009, he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Michel Lefebvre founded the Canadian ATLAS collaboration, now comprised of over 150 scientists, which contributed to the construction of the ATLAS particle detector that currently studies high energy proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV provided by the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, Geneva. He served on, and recently chaired, the Subatomic Physics Grant Selection Committee of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Dr. Lefebvre obtained his Degree from the Université Laval, and his Doctorate from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Victoria in the Physics and Astronomy Department, where he recently served as Graduate Advisor. He received the UVic Science Award for Teaching Excellence of the Faculty of Science, and the 2006 UVic Craigdarroch Silver Medal for Excellence in Research. He enjoys teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and working with colleagues both at UVic and at CERN. Dr. Lefebvre is currently on leave at the Laboratoire d’Annecy-le-Vieux de Physique des Particules, France.

Dr. Gilbert Holder’s areas of research and interests are astrophysics and cosmology, working primarily on studies of the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure in the universe, dark energy, the first stars, and massive clusters of galaxies.

He completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at Queen’s University, and his Ph.D. in Astronomy and
Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He is now an Associate Professor of Physics at McGill University, a Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s (CIfAR) Cosmology & Gravity Program, and he is the Canada Research Chair in Cosmological Astrophysics. Prior to commencing at McGill, Dr. Holder was a fellow for three years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and a Senior Research Associate at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto.

Convocation Hall
31 King's College Cir
Toronto, Canada

Friday, January 28, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST)

Organizer

The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society (ASX) is a non-profit organization run by the University of Toronto Community, in Ontario, Canada. ASX’s purpose is to educate, excite, and inspire students, professionals, and the general public about astronomy and space.